Recently, Microsoft is quite open about the future of VC++, unlike the
years before, and things are looking good actually. Herb Sutter is busy
working on Concur (see Concur & C++ Presentation at Google
Video).
Nice to see a real guru like him working on concurrency stuff, cause he
might have a chance to get it working and used (after all, he is the
chairman of the ISO C++ committee and the VC++ lead). The VC++ compiler
is getting a new
frontend.
This also includes a new code
model
which, for the first time, allows access to the compiler's
AST.
While it might sound like a normal thing these days, the AST wasn't
available earlier because the compiler is partly 20 years
old:

"In the days of the 256K limit, a large, in-memory structure such as
a whole-program AST was not feasible"

Note this is all post-Orcas, so we're talking about Visual Studio 201x
here. They're also working on the native code side (even the vice
president understood now that native code isn't going
anywhere),
including stuff from C++
0x.
Interesting stuff going on for sure, after they have fallen behind with
the compiler quite a bit compared to the latest Intel C++ or Sun Studio.